TimePilot Best Practices

Inside TimePilot Central

If you use TimePilot on a daily or weekly basis, you
probably spend a lot of time with TimePilot Central. The TimePilot Central
screen contains lots of data; sometimes you can become more efficient by
simplifying things.

In TimePilot Central, there are several ways to do this:

The quickest way is to display only the columns you need in
the Transaction List. You can have as many as 32 columns of data for each
transaction. Few people need that much, so TimePilot gives you a way to weed out
the columns you don’t want. Here’s how:

With
TimePilot Central displaying All Transactions, right-click the green bar
at the top of the transactions. A pop-up box will appear listing all 32 columns,
with checkboxes for each. Remove the checks (by clicking on the box) for any
category you don’t need to see.

You can also customize the columns you see when you view an individual
employee's transactions. Just repeat the process above after double-clicking an
employee's name to see just their transactions.

Now that you’ve pruned your columns, let’s say you want to
see the latest clock-ins and clock-outs at the top of the screen. Just click the
"Date" header and the transactions will re-sort themselves, with the latest at
the top. If you don’t like what you see, click the Date header again to
re-arrange them to put the latest at the bottom.

A refresher: In the first column, you’ll see either a red triangle, a "+"
sign or nothing at all. The red triangle indicates a clock-in, nothing at all
indicates a clock-out, and the "+" means a supervisor has inserted a clock-in or
clock-out or a block of time.

If
all is well, when you click on an employee’s name in the employee list to view
just his or her transactions, you should see a pattern of alternating red
triangles and blank spaces. Because the human brain is faster than
software at distinguishing patterns, we designed the
"triangle-blank-triangle-blank" pattern to be easy to spot.

If you see two triangles or two blanks in a row, that indicates that the
employee probably has forgotten to clock in or out. In this case, the
software will also give you a second hint: the employee’s name in the
employee list will be in red.

If you spot a transaction that needs to be corrected, there are a couple of
ways to do it:

Double-click the transaction. A window will appear that
lists all of the transaction’s details, and you can make the changes there.
There’s also a space for Notes, so you can attach a comment to the
transaction; for instance: "Late arrival excused by John Smith." A small
icon that looks like an envelope will appear next to the transaction in the
list. (Don’t see it? Make sure you display the Notes column as described at
the start of this article.)

Right-click the transaction.A pop-up menu will give
you a variety of choices: Among them are Modify, Delete, Insert an "In"
Transaction, Insert an "Out" Transaction and Insert Time Amount (a block of
time: a vacation day, for instance).

There’s one other option in the right-click pop-up menu that may be
especially useful around this time of year. It’s called "Adjust
Transaction Dates and Times."

Let’s say that you forget to update the time on your TimePilot Vetro clock in
standalone mode (you use your USB drive to collect data) to account for the
November 4 change from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time. Five days later,
after downloading the hundreds of clock-ins and clock-outs that have been
recorded by your Vetro, you realize that they’re all an hour later than they
should be.

You could double-click each of those hundreds of
transactions and make the change individually, but that’s going to take
quite a while. Why not do it all at once? All you have to do is "Adjust
Transaction Dates and Times."

Here’s how:

Click the first transaction you want to change, then scroll down, hold
down the Control key on your keyboard and click the last transaction you
want to change. This will highlight all the transactions that appear between
the two transactions you clicked.

Move your cursor anywhere within the highlighted area, then click your
right mouse button. The pop-up menu will include an entry called "Adjust
Transaction Dates and Times." Click it.

For this example, we want to subtract 60 minutes from each of the
highlighted transactions, so enter -60 in the Minutes field and click OK.
The software will "back up" all the highlighted transactions by an hour.

Now that the transactions are corrected, don’t forget to change the
time on your clocks!